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Edge of the Story
Observation 8 - When A Label Changes Everything (Part 1) - The Gate
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This episode traces a twenty-year thread that begins at a chance meeting at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego in the summer of 2006 — and ends at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office on April 18, 2026.
At the center of the story: ibogaine, a compound derived from a shrub native to Central Africa, classified by the U.S. government since 1970 as a Schedule I controlled substance — the same list as heroin — while research increasingly suggests it may be one of the most effective treatments ever discovered for PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and opioid addiction in combat veterans.
And the people who spent seventeen years saying so before anyone in Washington was ready to listen.
THE THREE HEADLINES — WHAT I HEARD THIS WEEK
Headline One
Veterans Affairs Report Shows Slight Decline in Total Veteran Suicides, But Rise in Suicide Rate — Connecting Vets / Audacy — February 9, 2026
https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/get-help/mental-health/report-shows-decline-in-total-veteran-suicides-rise-in-rate
6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023 — 17.5 per day. The suicide rate per veteran increased even as total numbers fell slightly, and remains twice the rate of non-veterans. More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide every year since 2001.
VA 2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report — U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs — February 2026
https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/suicide_prevention/data.asp
Headline Two
Psychoactive Drug Ibogaine Effectively Treats Traumatic Brain Injury in Special Ops Military Vets — Stanford Medicine — July 24, 2025
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/01/ibogaine-ptsd.html
A Stanford Medicine study published in Nature Mental Health tracked 30 special operations veterans through ibogaine treatment. Before treatment: 47% reported suicidal ideation. One month after: 7%. Lead researcher Dr. Nolan Williams: "No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury."
Source Study: Magnesium-Ibogaine Therapy in Veterans with Traumatic Brain Injuries — Nature Medicine — January 5, 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02705-w
Follow-up Brain Imaging Study — Nature Mental Health — July 24, 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-024-00389-2
Headline Three
Trump Signs Order to Speed Up Review of Psychedelic Drugs for Mental Health Treatment — Associated Press / NBC News — April 18, 2026
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/excutive-order-psychedelic-drugs-ibogaine-mental-health-research-rcna340790
President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to accelerate research, approval, and access to psychedelic therapies including ibogaine. The FDA cleared the first-ever ibogaine investigational new drug application the same day. In the Oval Office for the signing: Marcus Luttrell, who told the President: "You're going to save a lot of lives through it. It absolutely changed my life for the better."
Full signing coverage — OPB / Associated Press — April 18, 2026
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/18/trump-signs-order-to-speed-review-of-psychedelics/
Executive order signing coverage — Marijuana Moment — April 18, 2026
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/trump-signs-order-to-accelera
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A Dinner Invite With Consequences
SPEAKER_00In July of 2006, the governor of Texas was on vacation in San Diego. He didn't want to sit on the beach, so when a Navy pilot offered a tour of the nearby naval base, he said yes. At the end of the tour, he had dinner with two of his guides. One of them was quiet, didn't say much about himself. Perry didn't push. Back at his hotel room that night, Perry opened his laptop and Googled the man's name. It didn't appear until the third page of results. When he finally found it and typed in the operation it referenced, the screen filled. He had shared a meal with a man who had survived the deadliest day in naval special warfare since Vietnam, and had no idea. Before they'd parted that evening, Perry had said what he says to everyone. If you're ever through Austin, come by and see me. Nine months later, the phone rang at the governor's mansion security post. A young man was at the gate, said the governor told him to come by. That phone call is where today's episode begins. And where, though no one knew it yet, something started moving that could not be stopped. This week we're looking at the place where everything changes when you start calling it something else. And in that moment, everything changes. Whether you're in your car, out on a run, somewhere in the middle of your day, or in the shop bending wire, there are moments that don't announce themselves. They don't raise their voice, they don't stop the room, but they change everything. This is Edge of the Story, and I'm Daryl Best. Today's episode is about two things that are really one thing. The first is a throwaway line from a governor at a dinner in San Diego, a line he'd said to hundreds of people, never expecting anyone to act on it. The second is a compound derived from the root bark of a shrub in Central Africa, that the United States government has officially classified for decades as having no medical use and a high potential for abuse, and that combat veterans have been crossing the border into Mexico to access in unregulated clinics because it was the only thing that was working. Those two things are connected. And the connection runs through one of the most important public health stories of the past 20 years, a story that most people don't know, told through the people who were living it long before anyone in Washington was ready to listen. We're not investigating stories. We're investigating moments people notice. Somebody noticed this one in a hotel room in San Diego on page three of a Google search on a summer night in 2006. Julia, what headlines do we have for the What I Heard This Week segment?
SPEAKER_01Well, this week, Daryl, we have three different headlines that are all connected by a single thread. Our first headline comes from a Veterans Affairs report, as reported on the Connecting Vets podcast on Odyssey, which reported on a Veterans Affairs report showing a slight decline in total veteran suicides, but rise in suicide rate. The VA's 2025 National Veterans Suicide Prevention Report found that 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023. That works out to 17.5 per day, down slightly from the year before. But the rate of suicide per veteran adjusted for the shrinking veteran population actually went up, and it remains twice the rate of non-veterans in this country. More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide every single year since 2001. The number has not moved in response to the tools the system currently provides. Our second headline comes from Stanford Medicine. The headline reads: Psychoactive drug ibogain effectively treats traumatic brain injury in special ops military vets. Stanford Medicine published a study this past July in the journal Nature Mental Health, 30 special operations veterans. Before treatment, nearly half, 47%, reported having had suicidal thoughts. One month after Ibogaine treatment, that number was 7%. The lead researcher, Dr. Nolan Williams, stated, No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury. 30 people. No placebo group, early data, but 30 people, nearly half of whom had been thinking about ending their lives. And one month later, 7%. The link to that study is in our show notes. And our final headline comes from the Associated Press. The headline reads: Trump signs executive order to speed up review of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment. This morning, Saturday, April 18th, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to speed up reviews of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment, including ibogaine. The Associated Press covered the signing. You can also read it at NBC News. The link is in our show notes. In the Oval Office for the signing, the President's top health officials, podcaster Joe Rogan, and Marcus Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL from the film Lone Survivor. Luttrell told the president at the ceremony, You're going to save a lot of lives through it. It absolutely changed my life for the better. We'll come back to that moment at the end of the episode. As I said, all three of these headlines are sewn together and it completes a circle that started at a dinner table in San Diego 20 years ago.
Operation Red Wings And Aftermath
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Julia. I want to discuss these three articles in our deep dive segment. But before we do that, a quick note on names because this story has two men named Marcus and two men named Lou Trell, and keeping them straight actually matters. Marcus Lou Trell, Navy SEAL, Navy Cross, Purple Heart, the man known from Lone Survivor, Operation Red Wings, Afghanistan, Morgan Lou Trell, Marcus's twin brother, also a Navy SEAL, also a neuroscientist, now a U.S. Congressman from Texas. Marcus Capone, also a decorated Navy SEAL, and the central figure in the Netflix documentary In Waves and War, and co-founder of a nonprofit that has funded IBogaine treatment for over a thousand veterans. Three different men, all essential to this story. We'll keep them clear as we go. Our deep dive segment opens twenty years ago at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego in July of two thousand six. Rick Perry, then governor of Texas, is on vacation. Perry has been there three days and he's restless. A Texas Naval Aviator slips a card to Perry's security detail. Would the governor want a tour of Naval Base Coronado, home of the Naval Special Warfare Center where Navy SEALs are trained? Perry said later, that was perfect for me. I go, thank you, Lord. I don't have to sit on a beach for hours and be bored out of my head. They made arrangements. The tour was led by two men. One was the pilot, the other was quiet. Perry used the word terse, built in a way that suggested someone who had been tested repeatedly and had not broken. He said almost nothing about himself. Perry, sensing discomfort, didn't push. After the tour, Perry and Anita invited both men to dinner.
SPEAKER_01Walking away from that dinner, an officer pulled Perry aside. The quiet one, he said, the man who hadn't said much, had just returned from the White House. He'd been awarded the Navy Cross by President Bush, the second highest honor a sailor can receive. Perry went back to his room and opened his laptop. He googled the name Marcus Lou Trell. It didn't appear until the third page of results. A small mention of Navy service. Perry remembered something Marcus had said at dinner. He typed those words. The screen filled.
SPEAKER_00He'd had dinner with a man who had survived the deadliest single day in naval special warfare since Vietnam. June 28th, 2005. A four-man reconnaissance team in the mountains of Afghanistan hunting a Taliban commander discovered by local goat herders. What followed was a firefight that killed three of Marcus' teammates. The rescue mission that responded lost sixteen more, eight Navy SEALs, and eight Army Special Operations soldiers when their helicopter was shot down. nineteen total. Marcus Lutrell was the only survivor of his four man team. He was shot in both legs and had a fractured vertebrae in his back. He literally dragged himself across miles of Afghan terrain and was sheltered by a local villager under a centuries old tribal code of protection until he could be rescued. He came home. And by the time Perry found him on page three of a Google search, the country had barely noticed he existed. Before they'd parted ways that evening, Perry had said what he says to everyone. If you're ever through Austin, come by and see me. He described this line honestly, years later, on the Joe Rogan experience. I probably said that to hundreds of people. Fat chance you're gonna come and knock on the door of the governor's mansion. Right? It's a nice thing to say, realizing that they're not gonna show up. He called Marcus's mother when he got back to Texas, told her he'd seen her son, he's doing all right. If I can ever help, let me know. Then went about his business. Marcus deployed again to Iraq with his twin brother Morgan. Months passed.
A SEAL Shows Up At The Gate
SPEAKER_01And then, in the spring of 2007, nine months after that dinner at the Hotel Del Coronado, the phone rang at the governor's mansion security post. There's a young man at the gate, the guard said. Says the governor told him, Next time he's through Austin, come by and see you. He's here. Perry's response, in his own words. I said, that's hilarious.
SPEAKER_00Marcus Lou Trell was, as Perry later described him, a very sick young man. He was addicted to the painkillers the VA had been prescribing him since his injuries in Afghanistan. He was not sleeping. He was volatile. He was by every clinical measure, a man in crisis. So he went to the gate of the governor's mansion and held a stranger to an offhand promise. Perry answered. Over the months that followed, the Perries effectively adopted him. A bedroom on the third floor, an air mattress, a television he left on while he slept. Anita Perry, trained as a nurse, took the lead on his care. Perry used his office to call Navy Secretary Ray Mabus directly and demand Marcus be reevaluated for tri care coverage. He found him a spine surgeon. He took him fishing. Perry has said there are one thousand plus just like him. They just didn't have a governor to intervene, and that pisses me off. That sentence is load bearing. We will come back to it.
SPEAKER_01To understand what comes next, you need to understand what the standard treatment for combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury looked like in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, sleep aids, opioid pain management for physical injuries, talk therapy, when veterans could access it consistently, which many couldn't. These are not useless tools. For many people, they provide real relief. But for a significant subset of combat veterans, particularly special operations forces, who had experienced repeated deployments, traumatic brain injuries, and compounded trauma, the standard tools were not reaching the root of the problem. They were managing symptoms while the underlying damage continued. Perry watched this up close. He visited veterans at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. He described seeing soldiers with brain injuries and severe burns receive opioids in lollipop form, pain management handed out because there was nothing else to hand out. He concluded, in his own words, that the government had absolutely failed the people it sent into combat. He helped Marcus, one man with the resources of a governor's office, intervening in one veteran's crisis. And the question that stayed with him, the one he couldn't answer, was what about the thousand others? It would be more than a decade before he found something that looked like an answer. It would come from Morgan Luttrell, Marcus's twin.
SPEAKER_00By 2017, Rick Perry was Trump's first term Secretary of Energy. He'd brought Morgan Luttrell onto his team at the department. Morgan was a neuroscientist as well as a Navy SEAL, one of the most unusual combinations imaginable. In twenty eighteen, Morgan told Perry he needed to take some time off. He was going to a clinic in Mexico. There was a compound. Several other SEALs had done it. It had changed their lives. In some cases they said it had saved them. The compound was called ibogaine. Perry's first reaction, Morgan, you need to be careful with that kind of stuff. That reaction, that instinct is exactly where the story gets interesting. Because that reaction wasn't random. It was the product of a word, a classification, a label that had been doing specific intentional work in American culture for decades.
SPEAKER_01Here is what ibogaine actually is. And for anyone who has never heard of it before today, this part matters. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring compound extracted from the root bark of a plant called Tabernanthi iboga, a shrub native to Central Africa, particularly Gabon and Cameroon. The plant has been known for centuries, used in West African healing traditions, particularly in a practice called buiti, for rituals of initiation and healing. In a clinical setting, ibogaine produces a prolonged altered state, commonly 12 to 20 hours, sometimes longer. People who have been through it consistently describe it not as a hallucination in the conventional sense, but as something closer to a forced confrontation with memory. Images surface, patterns become visible, connections get made between experiences that had been locked away. Veterans describe it as a life review, like watching a film of everything that has shaped you, whether you wanted to see it or not. The working theory among researchers is that ibogain resets certain neural pathways, particularly those involved in dopamine regulation, in a way that can interrupt both addictive behavior cycles and the trauma response loops embedded in PTSD. Where traditional antidepressants work on the surface of brain chemistry, ibogain appears to reach deeper. Stanford researchers have described it as accomplishing in hours what might take years in conventional therapy, getting to what Marcus Luttrell himself, after his own treatments, called the root of what's messing with you.
SPEAKER_00That is a significant claim. And the science, while promising, is still early. Most of the research so far consists of small observational studies. The 2025 Stanford study of 30 veterans is the most rigorous look yet, and its findings are striking. But 30 people without a placebo group is a beginning, not a conclusion. The cardiac risk is real and should not be minimized. Ibogaine can cause dangerous heart arrhythmias. At least 30 people have died after taking ibogaine. The magnesium protocol used in the Stanford study appeared to address the cardiac risk, but with only 30 participants, the data is still thin. This is exactly why rigorous, federally funded clinical trials matter. And this is exactly why the label Ibogaine has been carrying for decades has made those trials nearly impossible to run.
SPEAKER_01In the United States, Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance. Schedule one is the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act. It carries three criteria: high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use and treatment, and lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision. Ibogaine was placed in Schedule I in 1970 as part of the Controlled Substances Act, the same legislation that grouped it alongside heroin, LSD, and Ecstasy. That classification has not changed in 55 years.
SPEAKER_00Think about what that classification actually does. If you are a pharmaceutical company, Schedule I tells you stay away. The regulatory pathway is undefined. The liability exposure is enormous. Cultural signal is wrong. No major pharmaceutical company has been willing to go near Ibogaine, not because it doesn't work, because of the name on the list. If you are a researcher, Schedule I means your funding options are severely limited. Your grant applications face resistance, your career takes on risk it would not carry for a differently classified compound. The system does not reward you for going there. If you are a veteran in Texas who has tried everything the VA offered, every medication, every therapy, every program, and none of it reach the place where the damage actually lives. You get on a plane to Mexico. You go to a clinic operating outside U.S. regulatory oversight, no standardized cardiac screening, no required monitoring protocols, no obligation to report adverse events. You take a compound that could, if done incorrectly, kill you. And you do it because the alternative, the one the system handed you, has been failing for years. And the number on the door back home keeps ticking. Seventeen and a half veteran suicides per day.
SPEAKER_01When Perry first got involved with Ibogaine advocacy, his political advisor warned him it would damage the reputation he'd built over 40 years in public service. A conservative Republican, a former governor, a former cabinet secretary, his name in the same sentence as the word psychedelic. Perry heard that and decided the math didn't work the way his advisor thought it did.
Texas Funds Trials And A Pathway
SPEAKER_00Here's what the classification couldn't prevent. Word was already moving through SEAL networks, through veteran communities, through the informal systems that form when the formal ones fail. Veterans who had been to the clinics in Mexico were coming back and telling other veterans quietly but consistently it works. Morgan Lutrell was part of that network. He went to Mexico in twenty eighteen, and when he came back and told Perry what had happened, something shifted. Perry started paying attention. He talked to other SEALs. He heard the same thing repeatedly. Before I was at the end, after I could see a way forward. In twenty twenty three, Perry traveled to a clinic near Tijuana himself. He underwent a twelve hour Ibogaine session. He described coming out with a sense of calm and mental clarity that surprised him. And he started calling Ibogaine what he believed it was. Not a drug policy debate, not a countercultural relic, but a potential answer to a crisis the system had failed to solve, being kept out of reach by a label it had been given half a century ago. He partnered with Brian Hubbard, chairman of Americans for Ibogaine, and together they built what they called the Texas Ibogaine Initiative.
SPEAKER_01Marcus Luttrell, the man who had shown up at the gate in 2007, testified before both the Texas House and the Texas Senate. He described what opioids had done to him after his injuries. He described what Ibogaine had done instead. He told the legislature, After I was injured, opioids got their hooks into me. And no matter what I tried, I couldn't let go of the pain and the baggage I was carrying from my life as a warfighter. Legislators also saw something else before they voted. A private screening of a Netflix documentary In Waves and War was held at the Texas State Capitol. Directed by John Schenk and Bonnie Cohen, the film follows Navy SEAL Marcus Capone, a different man from the Lou Trells, though part of the same world, through ibogaine treatment at a clinic in Mexico, with Stanford researchers monitoring his progress. Capone is a decorated SEAL who returned from Afghanistan with treatment-resistant PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Conventional treatment had not reached it. He and his wife Amber eventually found Ibogaine. The film captures the treatment, the recovery, and the aftermath, unflinching and, by most accounts, impossible to watch without being moved. After the screening, Texas legislators who had walked in skeptical walked out having heard combat veterans describe, in their own voices, what the compound had given back to them. Senate Bill 20. 2308 passed with bipartisan support. Governor Greg Abbott signed it. Texas committed$50 million, the largest public investment in psychedelic research in American history, to fund clinical trials and build a pathway toward FDA approval.
The Moment That Locked In
SPEAKER_00Other states followed. Fifteen states sent representatives to a meeting in Aspen to begin developing a coordinated multi-state research framework. And this morning in the Oval Office, the President of the United States signed an executive order directing his administration to speed up reviews of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment. Morgan Luttrell, the twin brother who first told Perry about Ibogaine in 2018, now Congressman said, I can personally attest to the significant benefits of this treatment. It changed my life. We're losing too many veterans. If this treatment gives us a chance to change that, we owe it to them to pursue it. The label hasn't changed. Schedule one still says no medical use, high potential for abuse. But what is being built around that label, in labs, in legislatures, in the Oval Office this morning suggests the label is losing its hold. We said at the start of the show, we're not investigating stories. We're investigating moments people noticed. So let's go back to the moment. July two thousand six, a hotel room in San Diego. A governor opens his laptop, types a name that doesn't appear until page three, types three more words and the screen fills. He'd had dinner with this man, shaken his hand, said the line he says to everyone. And now, sitting alone in that hotel room, he understood for the first time who he'd been talking to. That is the moment. Not because Perry knew in that hotel room that Ibigaine existed, he didn't. That was still more than a decade away. But because something locked in that night, a sense of obligation that had no formal shape yet, a question without an answer, what do we actually owe these people? The line he'd said at dinner, come by and see me, turned out to be the beginning of an answer he didn't know he was going to spend seventeen years trying to give.
SPEAKER_01Marcus Luttrell showed up at that gate in 2007 because he was desperate, and because someone had extended an invitation, and because he was willing to hold a stranger to it. Perry answered because when it came down to it, he meant it. And what followed from that, the years in the house, the calls to Navy secretaries, the watching up close as the system failed this man over and over, all of it built the foundation for what Perry eventually became not a drug policy advocate, not a political strategist making a calculated bet, a man who watched someone he cared about be handed pills that didn't work, while something else existed that nobody in power was willing to look at, and who decided that was no longer acceptable.
Part Two Tease: Renaming Addiction
SPEAKER_00That's the story of Marcus Lutrell, and the moment a phone call from a gate had changed everything. But as we were putting this episode together, we realized there's another side to this story. A side that's too big and too important to squeeze into the end of this show.
SPEAKER_01Right. Because to understand why veterans were crossing the border for ibogaine in the first place, you have to understand what happened to them here at home. You have to understand the opioid crisis.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So next week in part two of this story, we're going to look at the moment a pharmaceutical company decided to rename addiction. Here's a preview of what's coming.
SPEAKER_01They called it pseudoaddiction. It was coined in 1989 by two researchers, David Haddock and David Weisman, based on a single case study of a 17-year-old leukemia patient. The theory was that patients who appeared addicted, asking for drugs by name, hoarding pills, showing withdrawal symptoms, weren't actually addicted. They were just in pain. And the solution wasn't to stop the opioids. The solution was to prescribe more.
SPEAKER_00Join us next week for part two of the moment it can't be contained. Edge of the Story is produced high atop Chalk Mountain. If the gates are open, come on in. You can find us at www.edge of the story.com slash herd. I'm Daryl.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Julia.
SPEAKER_00We'll see you next week.